Can a Catholic institution promote sustainable behavior? Field experimental evidence on donations for climate protection

Christoph Feldhaus, Marvin Gleue and Andreas Löschel

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2022, vol. 98, issue C

Abstract: We conduct a field experiment with the visitors of the German Catholic Convention in Münster, Germany. We aim to investigate the effect of the announced attitude of a Catholic institution concerning climate protection efforts, of the salience of people's religious identity and of the corresponding interaction on people's willingness to donate for climate protection. Our results suggest that the supporting signal by the Catholic institution substantially increases donations by about 56 % (from 0.95 € to 1.48 € per participant). This effect is mainly driven by more subjects donating, as the share of donators increases by 8 percentage points due to the signal (from 17 % to 25 %). We observe neither a direct effect of the salient religious identity nor an interaction of the salient identity with the institution's signal. Our results thus indicate that a Catholic authority can actually promote sustainable behavior. This effect seems not strengthened when people's religious identity is rendered salient or limited to the most religious people or religious people in their most religious state of mind.

Keywords: Climate mitigation; Charitable giving; Priming; Religiosity; Field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D64 D91 Q56 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804322000301
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:98:y:2022:i:c:s2214804322000301

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2022.101855

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().